FIFA to Replace World Ranking System With Fan Voting

April 1st, 2010 | by: Daryl |

blatter The latest FIFA World Rankings were released yesterday, and everything looked very familiar with Spain, Brazil and the Netherlands making up the top three. But all that’s about to change. Because after years of complaints about the ranking system, FIFA is finally willing to admit that it doesn’t work. The current system uses international results from the past four years and a mathematic formula to weigh the importance of those games and award points accordingly. It’s all very studious, yet the result is a ranking table that no one can agree on.

So in a move similar to the new Man of the Match award, FIFA will open up the rankings to a public vote, starting from immediately after World Cup 2010.

“We feel it’s important to give fans what they want,” said FIFA chief Sepp Blatter. “We recognize the unpopularity of our current ranking and seeding system and are making these adjustments so that football fans around the world will finally have a ranking table they believe in.”

Fans will be encouraged to submit a list of their top 20 current international football teams via FIFA’s website, and the results will then be collated into the new FIFA Fan’s World Ranking table, beginning in late August of this year.

I have the same reservations about this as I do about the Man of the Match voting. It’s obviously open to partisanship and all kinds of other external biases. But football is supposed to be the people’s game, not the mathematician’s, and so I’ll be interested to see how this works out. Who do you think will be top of the first FIFA Fan’s World Ranking in August 2010?

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Nick

Haha, nice one. If this were actually true England would be on top for sure!
Jose

Finally, India, China and the U.S. to break into the Top 3!
Matilda

I suppose that if this happens no one will try and cite the FIFA rankings as proof that one team is better than another (a lot of Americans seem fond of doing that for some reason). As long as everyone sees that it’s just a fan thing, then I think it’ll be quite interesting
BVBFan

Here is the proof
luke

and a happy april fool’s to you too!
Adham katt

Egypt*******
Sairax

OMG Canada’s gonna be moving up in the world!!
Sairax

Well I feel silly! Hehe read the whole post and comments first next time! That’s ok though, my plan is to have Canada host the WC. The hosts automatically qualify! It’s the perfect solution really ;)
Mark

WHAT THE HELL? FIFA keeps getting dumber and dumber. If Brazil and Spain are equal, Brazil without a doubt will get the edge over population votes alone, not to mention neutral supporters of Brazil all over the world. And it is true that China will probably move up in the ranks as well…
http://www.worldcupblog.org chris

What does it say that I didn’t even question this for a second when reading the headline?
http://www.worldcupblog.org Daryl

It says either something about yourself or something about Sepp. Haven’t decided yet.
Loewsmilesbetter

Sorry – haven’t we had this all along already ? ;-)
http://angola.worldcupblog.org/ Kiko

Good one man!
http://www.malawi.worldcupblog.org sscouser

“We feel it’s important to give fans what they want,” said FIFA chief Sepp Blatter.

Fans want Instant Video Replay.
http://www.malawi.worldcupblog.org sscouser

…and this just in, “starting next season, the Winners of Europa Cup will automatically qualify for the Champions League”
fan across the atlantic

Italy, they may not win pretty like the spanish, dutch or the brazilians but they get the results.
Pseudinho

I think they should have a vote done my each member association. Calculate the votes and see who tops the polls each month. Much like they do in college football. Fans are too bias and don’t always look at things objectively. Leave it the the current national teams head coach or some scout at each member association.
http://www.betsfreebets.com/ free bet

I dont know if fan voting is going to work either…
http://Mexico Daniel

I do’nt think “people’s vote” is the way to go. The ranking system we have today is not perfect but it can be improved. But the ranking has to be the result of a caltuculation made by experts, namely people of Fifa. A “people’s vote” will give a mess a variations of sympathy and antipathy. It would be the same as if an elected president in a country would say “Ok, people, you are to make the decisions, not me. I take vacations.” The people elect leaders, but the leaders make the decisions because they are the experts. It would be an anarchy if anyone could decide. We can see examples when people choose the best ever players: they choose players from their own team or country or players they know. The really best from other age are not in the list because most people do not know about them. The case of Maradona and Pele illustrates it. Most people of today have seen Maradona but not Pele and prefer Maradona. Garrincha is never among the best because people of today do not know about him. If the ranking is to be a popular joke, let people decide. If you want something serious, let the experts do it.
Dennis Justice

I know it was a joke, but a real solution is just to do rankings of country in each federation. They normally only play countries in their region anyway.
http://www.justonside.com jos

How about this??
http://www.justonside.com
It’s not perfect, its tricky getting these rankings to make everybody happy, including myself.
*It works best in Mozilla Firefox, it does not work at all in Internet Explorer.